Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom have spread Lee Falk's message of social tolerance, humanity, environmental awareness, and just plain "doing the right thing" to children and adults all over the world for more than sixty years. If you consider the fiercely competitive American cartoon strip industry, where reader loyalty is dictated by character consistency, you know that Falk is to be admired.
When you realize that The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician are the longest-running strips still being created by their originator, you begin to think that he should even be deified.
From the very beginning, the Falk has been a maverick in the world of sequential storytelling. Born slightly more than a decade after the turn of the century, he has always been a step ahead of his time as an innovator and writer of American comics.
Although Falk is considered first and foremost a comic strip writer, he is in fact a master of sequential literature, the art of telling an in-depth, sometimes very detailed, continuing story in panel form.
Sequential literature requires a great story to keep it going. It also needs very tightly constructed plots with rich, descriptive dialogue. Not an easy art to master.
Falk began writing Mandrake the Magician while studying at the University of Illinois during the Depression. In 1934, at the age of nineteen, while traveling through New York with his father, he stopped by King Features and offered his strip to them.
To his surprise, they accepted it. Though Falk drew the early episodes, he felt he was more of a writer and that the strip
... (1995 of 19792 Characters)
